Youth with high social status have the potential to play an important role in socializing their peers during adolescence. Unfortunately, there has been little empirical attention to this issue, particularly outside the West. My dissertation examined the characteristics that contribute to social status in the United States and Mainland China (Study 1) and the potential influence high-status youth have on their peers in the academic domain (Study 2) during early adolescence. Beginning with the entry into middle school, 3 times over 12 months, 934 youth (mean age = 12.7 years) in the United States and China made behavioral (i.e., prosocial behavior and academic engagement) and social status (i.e., sociometric popularity, perceived popularity, and admiration) nominations of their peers. They also reported on their antisocial behavior and academic engagement at these time points.
In both the United States and China, peer nominations of youth’s positive behavior were predictive of their heightened social status (Study 1). However, consistent with differences in cultural values (e.g., interdependence), this was stronger in China, particularly for perceived popularity, which had the least positive behavioral nomination profile in the United States, but not China. In Study 2, the academic engagement of peers that youth nominated as high in sociometric and perceived popularity, but not of peers they admired, was predictive over time of youth’s own academic engagement in the United States and China. Notably, this effect was evident over and above any initial similarity youth had with high-status youth they nominated. Taken together, the two studies suggest that one mechanism by which cultural values shape youth in the United States and China is social status in the peer system.